Ex UTA student guilty of aggravated assault in shooting of Arlington police officer

A Tarrant County jury took almost six hours Friday to find a 26-year-old Arlington man guilty of shooting Arlington police officer Edward Johnston.

Joel Conner McCommon, a former senior mathematics major at the University of Texas at Arlington, is also accused of killing a Saginaw teen.

The jury opted to convict on the lesser charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and he now faces a maximum 20 years in prison. Had McCommon been convicted of the original charge brought by the state, aggravated assault of a public servant, he would have been facing a maximum life prison term.

Johnston, a police officer for three years with the Arlington department, was assisting Saginaw police officers with serving a murder warrant on the night of April 25, 2016, when he was shot. Johnston was shot once while he was standing outside McCommon’s apartment located in the 400 block of Summit Avenue in Arlington. Johnston was released from the hospital the next day, police said.

Officers were attempting to arrest McCommon for the murder of Jordan Miles, a 17-year-old Saginaw High School student.

Tim Rodgers, assistant Tarrant County district attorney, said McCommon changed his story several times to fit the evidence, showed remarkable bad character and displayed a guilty mind at every step.

McCommon’s attorney raised the issue of self-defense in this case, but Rodgers said that tactic would not work because the defendant lied about what really happened and his lies did not match up with the physical evidence.

“If you find him not guilty, you are ignoring the law,” Rodgers said during his closing arguments on Friday. “He [McCommon] was not legally justified in shooting anyone that night.”

For example, prosecutors presented evidence that McCommon told a grand jury that his gun was pointed up when he fired a warning shot and initially he believed that a ricocheting bullet wounded Johnston.

McCommon changed his story and said he must have been pointing his gun downward when it was found that Johnston was wounded in the hip, Rodgers said.

McCommon’s defense attorney, Deric Walpole, said that officers never announced that they were police officers before they knocked at his client’s door at 11 p.m. that day. The police wore dark colored uniforms on a dark night and the officers were moving around and speaking quietly.

“They were quiet and they were hiding,” Walpole said describing the police activity prior to the shooting. “Everyone could have done something different and now everyone is paying the price for it.”

Miles was shot on April 23, during a failed attempt to sell a small amount of marijuana in a plan that was orchestrated by McCommon, according to police. Two days later, McCommon shot Johnston, according to Dawn Ferguson, Tarrant County prosecutor.

McCommon got his gun from Miles and then “left him in the street to die,” Ferguson said.

Before Miles was shot, McCommon had agreed to sell some marijuana to a girl he had met online. But instead of a girl, three men showed up, according to police.

The three men got into McCommon’s car and Miles pulled a fake gun, which McCommon believed at the time was real, according to McCommon’s testimony.

Two men identified as witnesses later told police that they saw McCommon fighting with Miles just before the shooting, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

The two witnesses said that McCommon pulled a handgun and fired a single shot that struck Miles in the stomach while all four men were sitting in McCommon’s car, the affidavit said.

McCommon testified Thursday that Miles dropped his gun in his car and then ran away from the vehicle with the two other men who accompanied him. McCommon said he chased Miles to retrieve his weapon.

Authorities said all four men struggled for the weapon while in the vehicle, but McCommon eventually retrieved the gun and drove away.

When police arrived in response to the shooting call, they saw Miles lying on the ground in the 200 block of Creekside Drive, holding his stomach.

“If he thought he was justified in using self-defense against Jordan, he should have called police,” Ferguson said during her closing arguments. “He showed you absolutely no remorse for what happened in Saginaw. All he cares about is himself and his gun.”